Management Metrics and Where You Find Them
Like fitness programming, gym business management is about setting goals and defining improvements. It’s how you measure them that provides the framework to get the work done. You can’t know what you’ve achieved until you’ve measured it.
Whether it’s measured in lean body mass, inches of muscle, or maximum deadlift weight, measurement tells you how much progress you’ve achieved relative to your workout goals.
It’s the same for business goals. If you want a leaner company, better sales performance, or higher rates of retention, you measure your actions to hit your targets. The measurements tell you what you have to do next, whether it’s time to celebrate or recalibrate and try again.
Know the Fitness Trend to Make It Your Friend
Here’s an example of why fitness club managers need performance metrics. Club Industry recently announced that the team training trend is over. This darling of the past few years may be reaching the point of diminishing returns.
It’s frightening if you’ve committed your wealth and worth to a single focus in team training. When big box fitness brands started to undercut pricing, this narrow segment’s rewards thinned out.
The right marketing report in your gym management software warns you when changes like this hit you. It might be declining sign-ups, rising turnover, or retention rates that alerts you. Membership behavior measurements and revenue reporting are critical to knowing if it’s time to make changes.
The advanced warning you get by capturing account, management, and point-of-sale data, justifies your investment in dedicated gym management software. Monitoring the right metrics tells you when to stay in your niche or find a new one. The imperative is always to know exactly where you are in business.
Of Gym Business Capital and Human Resources
So, what do you measure and how? Either small business owners get this right, learn to do it along the way, or they get run over by competitors. Fitness requires more than basic bookkeeping to stay ahead of the competition.
It’s about managing people as much as payments. You depend on access to cash to cover all of your rents, interest, bills, and wages. However, long before the money runs out, your membership’s behavior will give you plenty of advanced warning.
There’s an anthology of stories in your records about things like attendance and trainer bookings. Customers are your business. Their worth is a function of cost to acquire, the time they remain, and what they spend over the lifetime of their memberships.
The answers hide in your operational data. It’s up to you to identify which numbers have diagnostic value. Fortunately, businesses in the fitness industry have typical features and structures that
In the fitness business, you need the numbers for point of sale revenue, club management, and membership management. It helps to have the measurements grouped on dashboards that allow you to read related fitness club metrics at a glance.
Measuring Club Performance Improvement with Insight
The Insight gym management software suite of applications is built to measure fitness business performance. The system gathers all of the information about the business, membership, and income are contained within. Insight gives you easy access to the metrics to run the daily operations and make strategic decisions.
Successful measurement begins at the onboarding stage. Bring new members into the fold the right way, and there’s more you can do to make sure they stay. As part of the process, gather all of the information you need to serve them well. Information to gather includes background and baseline needs assessment.
Schedule check-ins with new members along a timeline that helps them build engagement. New members will never be more receptive to your offers and upgrades than at the start of your relationship. They appreciate this attention; it’s an excellent motivator. In return, they are more willing to provide the information to power the measurements that make management work.
The Business of Being Informed
The lessons you learn about managing a fitness business apply to all commercial organizations. Whether you’re a gym owner or club manager, measuring performance is at the core of your job description. You learn about working with people, as well as the daily routines of company operations and client programming.
As every trainer knows, smart fitness choices come from measured performance. With Insight, you have the tools to take the measurements and the reports to analyze them. What’s true for working out is right about running a business too. The payoff is improved return on investment for taking the time and making an effort to gather the data in the first place.
Bibliography
Dominic, Anthony. “Successful Onboarding May Be the Answer to Your Revenue and Retention Challenges.” Club Industry. April 9, 2019. https://www.clubindustry.com/insights-resources/successful-onboarding-may-be-answer-your-revenue-and-retention-challenges (accessed April 11, 2019).
Fagan, Lawrence. “Complementary Client Programming for Fitness Club Owners.” The Gym Insight Blog. September 9, 2018. https://blog.gyminsight.com/5133-complementary-client-programming-for-fitness-club-owners/ (accessed April 11, 2019).
Plummer, Thomas. “Team Training Is a Trend at the End of Its S-Curve.” Club Industry. April 4, 2019. https://www.clubindustry.com/trends/team-training-trend-end-its-s-curve (accessed April 11, 2019).